Singularities and Black Holes

First published Mon Jun 29, 2009

A spacetime singularity is a breakdown in the geometrical structure
of space and time. It is a topic of ongoing physical and philosophical
research to clarify both the nature and significance of such
pathologies. Because it is the fundamental geometry that is breaking
down, spacetime singularities are often viewed as an end, or “edge,” of
spacetime itself. However, numerous difficulties arise when one tries
to make this notion more precise.

Our current theory of spacetime, general relativity, not only allows
for singularities, but tells us that they are unavoidable in some
real-life circumstances. Thus we apparently need to understand the
ontology of singularities if we are to grasp the nature of space and
time in the actual universe. The possibility of singularities also
carries potentially important implications for the issues of physical
determinism and the scope of physical laws.

Black holes are regions of spacetime from which nothing, not even
light, can escape. A typical black hole is the result of the
gravitational force becoming so strong that one would have to travel
faster than light to escape its pull. Such black holes contain a
spacetime singularity at their center; thus we cannot fully understand
a black hole without also understanding the nature of singularities.
However, black holes raise several additional conceptual issues. As
purely gravitational entities, black holes are at the heart of many
attempts to formulate a theory of quantum gravity. Although they are
regions of spacetime, black holes are also thermodynamical entities,
with a temperature and an entropy; however, it is far from clear what
statistical physics underlies these thermodynamical facts. The
evolution of black holes is also apparently in conflict with standard
quantum evolution, for such evolution rules out the sort of increase in
entropy that seems to be required when black holes are present. This
has led to a debate over what fundamental physical principles are
likely to be preserved in, or violated by, a full quantum theory of
gravity.

General relativity, Einstein's theory of space, time, and gravity,
allows for the existence of singularities. On this nearly all agree.
However, when it comes to the question of how, precisely, singularities
are to be defined, there is widespread disagreement Singularties in
some way signal a breakdown of the geometry itself, but this presents
an obvious difficulty in referring to a singulary as a “thing” that
resides at some location in spacetime: without a well-behaved
geomtry, there can be no “location.” For this reason, some philosopers
and physicists have suggested that we should not speak of
“singularities” at all, but rather of “singular spacetimes.” In this
entry, we shall generally treat these two formulations as being
equivalent, but we will highlight the distinction when it becomes
significant.

Singularities are often conceived of metaphorically as akin to a
tear in the fabric of spacetime. The most common attempts to define
singularities center on one of two core ideas that this image readily
suggests.

The first is that a spacetime has a
singularity just in case it contains an incomplete path, one that
cannot be continued indefinitely, but draws up short, as it were, with
no possibility of extension. (“Where is the path supposed to go after
it runs into the tear? Where did it come from when it emerged from the
tear?”). The second is that a spacetime is singular just in case there
are points “missing from it.” (“Where are the spacetime
points that used to be or should be where the tear is?”) Another common
thought, often adverted to in discussion of the two primary notions, is
that singular structure, whether in the form of missing points or
incomplete paths, must be related to pathological behavior of some sort
on the part of the singular spacetime's curvature, that is, the
fundamental deformation of spacetime that manifests itself as “the
gravitational field.” For example, some measure of the intensity of the
curvature (“the strength of the gravitational field”) may increase
without bound as one traverses the incomplete path. Each of these three
ideas will be considered in turn below.

There is likewise considerable disagreement over the
significance of singularties. Many eminent physicists believe
that general relativity's prediction of singular structure signals a
serious deficiency in the theory; singularities are an indication that
the description offered by general relativity is breaking down. Others
believe that singularities represent an exciting new horizon for
physicists to aim for and explore in cosmology, holding out the promise
of physical phenomena differing so radically from any that we have yet
experienced as to ensure, in our attempt to observe, quantify and
understand them, a profound advance in our comprehension of the
physical world.

While there are competing definitions of spacetime singularities,
the most central, and widely accepted, criterion rests on the
possibility that some spacetimes contain incomplete paths. Indeed, the
rival definitions (in terms of missing points or curvature pathology)
still make use of the notion of path incompleteness.

(The reader unfamiliar with general relativity may find it helpful
to review the Hole Argument entry's
Beginner's Guide to Modern Spacetime Theories,
which presents a brief and accessible
introduction to the concepts of a spacetime manifold, a metric, and a
worldline.)

A path in spacetime is a continuous chain of events through
space and time. If I snap my fingers continually, without pause, then
the collection of snaps forms a path. The paths used in the most
important singularity theorems represent possible trajectories of
particles and observers. Such paths are known as “world-lines”; they
consist of the events occupied by an object throughout its lifetime.
That the paths be incomplete and inextendible means, roughly speaking,
that, after a finite amount of time, a particle or observer following
that path would “run out of world,” as it were—it would hurtle
into the tear in the fabric of spacetime and vanish. Alternatively, a
particle or observer could leap out of the tear to follow such a path.
While there is no logical or physical contradiction in any of this, it
appears on the face of it physically suspect for an observer or a
particle to be allowed to pop in or out of existence right in the
middle of spacetime, so to speak—if that does not suffice for
concluding that the spacetime is “singular,” it is difficult to imagine
what else would. At the same time, the ground-breaking work predicting
the existence of such pathological paths produced no consensus on what
ought to count as a necessary condition for singular structure
according to this criterion, and thus no consensus on a fixed
definition for it.

In this context, an incomplete path in spacetime is one that is both
inextendible and of finite proper length, which means that any particle
or observer traversing the path would experience only a finite interval
of existence that in principle cannot be continued any longer.
However, for this criterion to do the work we want it to, we'll need to
limit the class of spacetimes under discussion. Specifically, we shall
be concerned with spacetimes that are maximally extended (or
just maximal). In effect, this condition says that one's
representation of spacetime is “as big as it possibly can
be”—there is, from the mathematical point of view, no way to treat
the spacetime as being a proper subset of a larger, more extensive
spacetime.

If there is an incomplete path in a
spacetime, goes the thinking behind the requirement, then perhaps the
path is incomplete only because one has not made one's model of
spacetime big enough. If one were to extend the spacetime manifold
maximally, then perhaps the previously incomplete path could be
extended into the new portions of the larger spacetime, indicating that
no physical pathology underlay the incompleteness of the path. The
inadequacy would merely reside in the incomplete physical model we had
been using to represent spacetime.

An example of a non-maximally extended spacetime can be easily had,
along with a sense of why they intuitively seem in some way or other
deficient. For the moment, imagine spacetime is only two-dimensional,
and flat. Now, excise from somewhere on the plane a closed set shaped
like Ingrid Bergman. Any path that had passed through one of the points
in the removed set is now incomplete.

In this case, the maximal extension of the resulting spacetime is
obvious, and does indeed fix the problem of all such incomplete paths:
re-incorporate the previously excised set. The seemingly artificial
and contrived nature of such examples, along with the ease of
rectifying them, seems to militate in favor of requiring spacetimes to
be maximal.

Once we've established that we're interested in maximal spacetimes,
the next issue is what sort of path incompleteness is relevant
for singularities. Here we find a good deal of controversy. Criteria of
incompleteness typically look at how some parameter naturally
associated with the path (such as its proper length) grows. One
generally also places further restrictions on the paths that are worth
considering (for example, one rules out paths that could only be taken
by particles undergoing unbounded acceleration in a finite period of
time). A spacetime is said to be singular if it possesses a path such
that the specified parameter associated with that path cannot
increase without bound as one traverses the entirety of the
maximally extended path. The idea is that the parameter at issue will
serve as a marker for something like the time experienced by a particle
or observer, and so, if the value of that parameter remains finite
along the whole path then we've run out of path in a finite
amout of time, as it were. We've hit and “edge” or a “tear” in
spacetime.

For a path that is everywhere timelike (i.e., that does not involves
speeds at or above that of light), it is natural to take as the
parameter the proper time a particle or observer would experience along
the path, that is, the time measured along the path by a natural clock,
such as one based on the natural vibrational frequency of an atom.
(There are also fairly natural choices that one can make for spacelike
paths (i.e., those that consist of points at a single “time”) and null
paths (those followed by light signals). However, because the spacelike
and null cases add yet another level of difficulty, we shall not
discuss them here.) The physical interpretation of this sort of
incompleteness for timelike paths is more or less straightforward: a
timelike path incomplete with respect to proper time in the future
direction would represent the possible trajectory of a massive body
that would, say, never age beyond a certain point in its existence (an
analogous statement can be made, mutatis mutandis, if the path
were incomplete in the past direction).

We cannot, however, simply stipulate that a maximal spacetime is
singular just in case it contains paths of finite proper length that
cannot be extended. Such a criterion would imply that even the flat
spacetime described by special relativity is singular, which is surely
unacceptable. This would follow because, even in flat spacetime, there
are timelike paths with unbounded acceleration which have only a finite
proper length (proper time, in this case) and are also
inextendible.

The most obvious option is to define a spacetime as singular if and
only if it contains incomplete, inextendible timelike geodesics, i.e.,
paths representing the trajectories of inertial observers, those in
free-fall experiencing no acceleration “other than that due to
gravity.” However, this criterion seems too permissive, in that it
would count as non-singular some spacetimes whose geometry seems quite
pathological. For example, Geroch (1968) demonstrates that a spacetime
can be geodesically complete and yet possess an incomplete timelike
path of bounded total acceleration—that is to say, an inextendible
path in spacetime traversable by a rocket with a finite amount of fuel,
along which an observer could experience only a finite amount of proper
time. Surely the intrepid astronaut in such a rocket, who would never
age beyond a certain point but who also would never necessarily die or
cease to exist, would have just cause to complain that something was
singular about this spacetime.

We therefore want a definition that is not restricted to geodesics
when deciding whether a spacetime is singular. However, we need some
way of overcoming the fact that non-singular spacetimes include
inextendible paths of finite proper length. The most widely accepted
solution to this problem makes use of a slightly different (and
slightly technical) notion of length, known as “generalized affine
length.”[1]
Unlike proper length, this generalized
affine length depends on some arbitrary choices (roughly speaking, the
length will vary depending on the coordinates one chooses). However, if
the length is infinite for one such choice, it will be infinite for all
other choices. Thus the question of whether a path has a finite or
infinite generalized affine length is a perfectly well-defined
question, and that is all we'll need.

The definition that has won the most widespread acceptance —
leading Earman (1995, p. 36) to dub this the semiofficial
definition of singularities — is the following:

A maximal spacetime is singular if and only if it
contains an inextendible path of finite generalized affine
length.

To say that a spacetime is singular then is to say that there is at
least one maximally extended path that has a bounded (generalized
affine) length. To put it another way, a spacetime is nonsingular when
it is complete in the sense that the only reason any
given path might not be extendible is that it's already infinitely long
(in this technical sense).

The chief problem facing this definition of singularities is that
the physical significance of generalized affine length is opaque, and
thus it is unclear what the relevance of singularities,
defined in this way, might be. It does nothing, for example, to clarify
the physical status of the spacetime described by Geroch; it seems as
though the new criterion does nothing more than sweep the troubling
aspects of such examples under the rug. It does not explain why we
ought not take such prima facie puzzling and troubling
examples as physically pathological; it merely declares by fiat that
they are not.

So where does this leave us? The consensus seems to be that, while
it is easy in specific examples to conclude that incomplete paths of
various sorts represent singular structure, no entirely satisfactory,
strict definition of singular structure in their terms has yet been
formulated. For a philosopher, the issues offer deep and rich veins for
those contemplating, among other matters, the role of explanatory power
in the determination of the adequacy of physical theories, the role of
metaphysics and intuition, questions about the nature of the existence
attributable to physical entities in spacetime and to spacetime itself,
and the status of mathematical models of physical systems in the
determination of our understanding of those systems as opposed to in
the mere representation our knowledge of them.

We have seen that one runs into difficulties if one tries to define
singularities as “things” that have “locations,” and how some of those
difficulties can be avoided by defining singular spacetimes in terms of
incomplete paths. However, it would be desirable for many reasons to
have a characterization of a spacetime singularity in general
relativity as, in some sense or other, a spatiotemporal “place.” If one
had a precise characterization of a singularity in terms of points that
are missing from spacetime, one might then be able to analyze the
structure of the spacetime “locally at the singularity,” instead of
taking troublesome, perhaps ill-defined limits along incomplete paths.
Many discussions of singular structure in relativistic spacetimes,
therefore, are premised on the idea that a singularity represents a
point or set of points that in some sense or other is “missing” from
the spacetime manifold, that spacetime has a “hole” or “tear” in it
that we could fill in or patch by the appendage of a boundary to
it.

In trying to determine whether an ordinary web of cloth has a hole
in it, for example, one would naturally rely on the fact that the web
exists in space and time. In this case one can, so to speak, point to a
hole in the cloth by specifying points of space at a particular moment
of time not currently occupied by any of the cloth but which would, as
it were, complete the cloth were they so occupied. When trying to
conceive of a singular spacetime, however, one does not have the luxury
of imagining it embedded in a larger space with respect to which one
can say there are points missing from it. In any event, the demand that
the spacetime be maximal rules out the possibility of embedding the
spacetime manifold in any larger spacetime manifold of any ordinary
sort. It would seem, then, that making precise the idea that a
singularity is a marker of missing points ought to devolve upon some
idea of intrinsic structural incompleteness in the spacetime manifold
rather than extrinsic incompleteness with respect to an external
structure.

Force of analogy suggests that one define a spacetime to have points
missing from it if and only if it contains incomplete, inextendible
paths, and then try to use these incomplete paths to construct in some
fashion or other new, properly situated points for the spacetime, the
addition of which will make the previously inextendible paths
extendible. These constructed points would then be our candidate
singularities. Missing points on this view would correspond to a
boundary for a singular spacetime—actual points of an extended
spacetime at which paths incomplete in the original spacetime would
terminate. (We will, therefore, alternate between speaking of
missing points and speaking of boundary points, with
no difference of sense intended.) The goal then is to construct this
extended space using the incomplete paths as one's guide.

Now, in trivial examples of spacetimes with missing points such as
the one offered before, flat spacetime with a closed set in the shape
of Ingrid Bergman excised from it, one does not need any technical
machinery to add the missing points back in. One can do it by hand, as
it were. Many spacetimes with incomplete paths, however, do not allow
“missing points” to be attached in any obvious way by hand, as this
example does. For this program to be viable, which is to say, in order
to give substance to the idea that there really are points that in some
sense ought to have been included in the spacetime in the first place,
we require a physically natural completion procedure based on the
incomplete paths that can be applied to incomplete paths in arbitrary
spacetimes.

Several problems with this program make themselves felt immediately.
Consider, for example, an instance of spacetime representing the final
state of the complete gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric
body resulting in a black hole. (See
§3
below for
a description of black holes.) In this spacetime, any timelike path
entering the black hole will necessarily be extendible for only a
finite amount of proper time—it then “runs into the singularity”
at the center of the black hole. In its usual presentation, however,
there are no obvious points missing from the spacetime at all. It is,
to all appearances, as complete as the Cartesian plane, excepting only
for the existence of incomplete curves, no class of which indicates by
itself a place in the manifold to add a point to it to make the paths
in the class complete. Likewise, in our own spacetime every
inextendible, past-directed timelike path is incomplete (and our
spacetime is singular): they all “run into the Big Bang.” Insofar as
there is no moment of time at which the Big Bang occurred (there is no
moment of time at which time began, so to speak), there is no point to
serve as the past endpoint of such a path.

The reaction to the problems faced by these boundary constructions
is varied, to say the least, ranging from blithe acceptance of the
pathology (Clarke 1993), to the attitude that there is no satisfying
boundary construction currently available without ruling out the
possibility of better ones in the future (Wald 1984), to not even
mentioning the possibility of boundary constructions when discussing
singular structure (Joshi 1993), to rejection of the need for such
constructions at all (Geroch, Can-bin and Wald, 1982).

Nonetheless, many eminent physicists seem convinced that general
relativity stands in need of such a construction, and have exerted
extraordinary efforts in the service of trying to devise such
constructions. This fact raises several fascinating philosophical
problems. Though physicists offer as strong motivation the possibility
of gaining the ability to analyze singular phenomena locally in a
mathematically well-defined manner, they more often speak in terms that
strongly suggest they suffer a metaphysical, even an ontological, itch
that can be scratched only by the sharp point of a localizable,
spatiotemporal entity serving as the locus of their theorizing.
However, even were such a construction forthcoming, what sort of
physical and theoretical status could accrue to these missing points?
They would not be idealizations of a physical system in any ordinary
sense of the term, insofar as they would not represent a simplified
model of a system formed by ignoring various of its physical features,
as, for example, one may idealize the modeling of a fluid by ignoring
its viscosity. Neither would they seem necessarily to be only
convenient mathematical fictions, as, for example, are the physically
impossible dynamical evolutions of a system one integrates over in the
variational derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equations, for, as we have
remarked, many physicists and philosophers seem eager to find such a
construction for the purpose of bestowing substantive and clear ontic
status on singular structure. What sorts of theoretical entities, then,
could they be, and how could they serve in physical theory?

While the point of this project may seem at bottom identical to the
path incompleteness account discussed in
§1.1,
insofar as singular structure will be defined by the presence of
incomplete, inextendible paths, there is a crucial semantic and logical
difference between the two. Here, the existence of the incomplete path
is not taken itself to constitute the singular structure, but
rather serves only as a marker for the presence of singular structure
in the sense of missing points: the incomplete path is incomplete
because it “runs into a hole” in the spacetime that, were it filled,
would allow the path to be continued; this hole is the singular
structure, and the points constructed to fill it compose its locus.

Currently, however, there seems to be even less consensus on how
(and whether) one should define singular structure in terms of missing
points than there is regarding definitions in terms of path
incompleteness. Moreover, this project also faces even more technical
and philosophical problems. For these reasons, path incompleteness is
generally considered the default definition of singularities.

While path incompleteness seems to capture an important aspect of
the intuitive picture of singular structure, it completely ignores
another seemingly integral aspect of it: curvature pathology. If there
are incomplete paths in a spacetime, it seems that there should be a
reason that the path cannot go farther. The most obvious
candidate explanation of this sort is something going wrong with the
dynamical structure of the spacetime, which is to say, with the
curvature of the spacetime. This suggestion is bolstered by the fact
that local measures of curvature do in fact blow up as one approaches
the singularity of a standard black hole or the big bang singularity.
However, there is one problem with this line of thought: no species of
curvature pathology we know how to define is either necessary or
sufficient for the existence of incomplete paths. (For a discussion of
defining singularities in terms of curvature pathologies, see Curiel
1998.)

To make the notion of curvature pathology more precise, we will use
the manifestly physical idea of tidal force. Tidal force is
generated by the differential in intensity of the gravitational field,
so to speak, at neighboring points of spacetime. For example, when you
stand, your head is farther from the center of the Earth than your
feet, so it feels a (practically negligible) smaller pull downward than
your feet. (For a diagram illustrating the nature of tidal forces, see
Figure 9 of the entry on
Inertial Frames.)
Tidal forces are a physical manifestation of spacetime curvature,
and one gets direct observational access to curvature by measuring these
forces. For our purposes, it is important that in regions of extreme
curvature, tidal forces can grow without bound.

It is perhaps surprising that the state of motion of the observer as
it traverses an incomplete path (e.g. whether the observer is
accelerating or spinning) can be decisive in determining the physical
response of an object to the curvature pathology. Whether the object is
spinning on its axis or not, for example, or accelerating slightly in
the direction of motion, may determine whether the object gets crushed
to zero volume along such a path or whether it survives (roughly)
intact all the way along it, as in examples offered by Ellis and
Schmidt (1977). The effect of the observer's state of motion on his or
her experience of tidal forces can be even more pronounced than this.
There are examples of spacetimes in which an observer cruising along a
certain kind of path would experience unbounded tidal forces and so be
torn apart, while another observer, in a certain technical sense
approaching the same limiting point as the first observer, accelerating
and decelerating in just the proper way, would experience a perfectly
well-behaved tidal force, though she would approach as near as one
likes to the other fellow who is in the midst of being ripped to
shreds.[2]

Things can get stranger still. There are examples of incomplete
geodesics contained entirely within a well-defined area of a spacetime,
each having as its limiting point an honest-to-goodness point of
spacetime, such that an observer freely falling along such a path would
be torn apart by unbounded tidal forces; it can easily be arranged in
such cases, however, that a separate observer, who actually travels
through the limiting point, will experience perfectly well-behaved
tidal
forces.[3]
Here we have an example of an observer
being ripped apart by unbounded tidal forces right in the middle of
spacetime, as it were, while other observers cruising peacefully by
could reach out to touch him or her in solace during the final throes
of agony. This example also provides a nice illustration of the
inevitable difficulties attendant on attempts to localize singular
structure.

It would seem, then, that curvature pathology as standardly
quantified is not in any physical sense a well-defined property of a
region of spacetime simpliciter. When we consider the
curvature of four-dimensional spacetime, the motion of
the device that we use to probe a region (as well as the
nature of the device) becomes crucially important for the
question of whether pathological behavior manifests itself.
This fact raises questions about the
nature of quantitative measures of properties of entities in general
relativity, and what ought to count as observable, in the sense of
reflecting the underlying physical structure of spacetime. Because
apparently pathological phenomena may occur or not depending on the
types of measurements one is performing, it does not seem that this
pathology reflects anything about the state of spacetime itself, or at
least not in any localizable way. What then may it reflect, if
anything? Much work remains to be done by both physicists and by
philosophers in this area, the determination of the nature of physical
quantities in general relativity and what ought to count as an
observable with intrinsic physical significance. See Bergmann (1977),
Bergmann and Komar (1962), Bertotti (1962), Coleman and Korté
(1992), and Rovelli (1991, 2001, 2002a, 2002b) for discussion of many
different topics in this area, approached from several different
perspectives.

When considering the implications of spacetime singularities, it is
important to note that we have good reasons to believe that the
spacetime of our universe is singular. In the late 1960s, Hawking,
Penrose, and Geroch proved several singularity theorems, using the
path-incompleteness definition of singularities (see, e.g., Hawking and
Ellis 1973). These theorems showed that if certain reasonable premises
were satisfied, then in certain circumstances singularities could not
be avoided. Notable among these conditions was the “positive energy
condition” that captures the idea that energy is never negative. These
theorems indicate that our universe began with an initial singularity,
the “Big Bang,” 13.7 billion years ago. They also indicate that in
certain circumstances (discussed below) collapsing matter will form a
black hole with a central singularity.

Should these results lead us to believe that singularities are
real? Many physicists and philosophers resist this conclusion.
Some argue that singularities are too repugnant to be real. Others
argue that the singular behavior at the center of black holes and at
the beginning of time points to a the limit of the domain of
applicability of general relativity. However, some are inclined to take
general relativity at its word, and simply accept its prediction of
singularities as a surprising, but perfectly consistent account of the
geometry of our world.

As we have seen, there is no commonly accepted, strict definition of
singularity, no physically reasonable definition of
missing point, and no necessary connection of singular
structure, at least as characterized by the presence of incomplete
paths, to the presence of curvature pathology. What conclusions should
be drawn from this state of affairs? There seem to be two primary
responses, that of Clarke (1993) and Earman (1995) on the one hand,
and that of Geroch, Can-bin and Wald (1982), and Curiel (1998) on the
other. The former holds that the mettle of physics and philosophy
demands that we find a precise, rigorous and univocal definition
of singularity. On this view, the host of philosophical and
physical questions surrounding general relativity's prediction of
singular structure would best be addressed with such a definition in
hand, so as better to frame and answer these questions with precision
in its terms, and thus perhaps find other, even better questions to
pose and attempt to answer. The latter view is perhaps best summarized
by a remark of Geroch, Can-bin and Wald (1982): “The purpose of a
construction [of ‘singular points’], after all, is merely to
clarify the discussion of various physical issues involving singular
space-times: general relativity as it stands is fully viable with no
precise notion of ‘singular points’.” On this view, the specific
physics under investigation in any particular situation should dictate
which definition of singularity to use in that situation, if,
indeed, any at all.

In sum, the question becomes the following: Is there a need for a
single, blanket definition of singularity or does the urge for
one bespeak only an old Platonic, essentialist prejudice? This question
has obvious connections to the broader question of natural kinds in
science. One sees debates similar to those canvassed above when one
tries to find, for example, a strict definition of biological species.
Clearly part of the motivation for searching for a single exceptionless
definition is the impression that there is some real feature of the
world (or at least of our spacetime models) which we can hope to
capture precisely. Further, we might hope that our attempts to find a
rigorous and exceptionless definition will help us to better understand
the feature itself. Nonetheless, it is not entirely clear why we
shouldn't be happy with a variety of types of singular structure, and
with the permissive attitude that none should be considered the “right”
definition of singularities.

Even without an accepted, strict definition of singularity
for relativistic spacetimes, the question can be posed of what it may
mean to ascribe “existence” to singular structure under any
of the available open possibilities. It is not farfetched to think that
answers to this question may bear on the larger question of the
existence of spacetime points in general.

It would be difficult to argue that an incomplete path in a maximal
relativistic spacetime does not exist in at least some sense of the
term. It is not hard to convince oneself, however, that the
incompleteness of the path does not exist at any particular
point of the spacetime in the same way, say, as this glass of beer at
this moment exists at this point of spacetime. If there were a point on
the manifold where the incompleteness of the path could be localized,
surely that would be the point at which the incomplete path terminated.
But if there were such a point, then the path could be extended by
having it pass through that point. It is perhaps this fact that lies
behind much of the urgency surrounding the attempt to define singular
structure as “missing points.”

The demand that singular structure be localized at a particular
place bespeaks an old Aristotelian substantivalism that invokes the
maxim, “To exist is to exist in space and time” (Earman 1995, p. 28).
Aristotelian substantivalism here refers to the idea contained
in Aristotle's contention that everything that exists is a substance
and that all substances can be qualified by the Aristotelian
categories, two of which are location in time and location in space.
One need not consider anything so outré as incomplete,
inextendible paths, though, in order to produce examples of entities
that seem undeniably to exist in some sense of the term or other, and
yet which cannot have any even vaguely determined location in time and
space predicated of them. Indeed, several essential features of a
relativistic spacetime, singular or not, cannot be localized in the way
that an Aristotelian substantivalist would demand. For example, the
Euclidean (or non-Euclidean ) nature of a space is not something with a
precise location. Likewise, various spacetime geometrical structures
(such as the metric, the affine structure, etc.) cannot be localized in
the way that the Aristotelian would demand. The existential status of
such entities vis-à-vis more traditionally considered
objects is an open and largely ignored issue. Because of the way the
issue of singular structure in relativistic spacetimes ramifies into
almost every major open question in relativistic physics today, both
physical and philosophical, it provides a peculiarly rich and
attractive focus for these sorts of questions.

At the heart of all of our conceptions of a spacetime singularity is
the notion of some sort of failing: a path that disappears, points that
are torn out, spacetime curvature that becomes pathological. However,
perhaps the failing lies not in the spacetime of the actual world (or
of any physically possible world), but rather in the theoretical
description of the spacetime. That is, perhaps we shouldn't think
that general relativity is accurately describing the world when it
posits singular structure.

Indeed, in most scientific arenas, singular behavior is viewed as an
indication that the theory being used is deficient. It is therefore
common to claim that general relativity, in predicting that spacetime
is singular, is predicting its own demise, and that classical
descriptions of space and time break down at black hole singularities
and at the Big Bang. Such a view seems to deny that singularities are
real features of the actual world, and to assert that they are instead
merely artifices of our current (flawed) physical theories. A more
fundamental theory — presumably a full theory of quantum gravity
— will be free of such singular behavior. For example, Ashtekar
and Bojowald (2006) and Ashtekar, Pawlowski and Singh (2006) argue
that, in the context of loop quantum gravity, neither the big bang
singularity nor black hole singularities appear.

On this reading, many of the earlier worries about the status of
singularities become moot. Singularties don't exist, nor is the
question of how to define them, as such, particularly urgent. Instead,
the pressing question is what indicates the borders of the domain of
applicability of general relativity? We pick up this question below
in
Section 5
on quantum black holes, for it is in this
context that many of the explicit debates play out over the limits of
general relativity.

The simplest picture of a black hole is that of a body whose gravity
is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Bodies
of this type are already possible in the familiar Newtonian theory of
gravity. The “escape velocity” of a body is the velocity at which an
object would have to travel to escape the gravitational pull of the
body and continue flying out to infinity. Because the escape velocity
is measured from the surface of an object, it becomes higher if a body
contracts down and becomes more dense. (Under such contraction, the
mass of the body remains the same, but its surface gets closer to its
center of mass; thus the gravitational force at the surface increases.)
If the object were to become sufficiently dense, the escape velocity
could therefore exceed the speed of light, and light itself would be
unable to escape.

This much of the argument makes no appeal to relativistic physics,
and the possibility of such classical black holes was noted in the late
18th Century by Michel (1784) and Laplace (1796). These
Newtonian black holes do not precipitate quite the same sense of crisis
as do relativistic black holes. While light hurled ballistically from
the surface of the collapsed body cannot escape, a rocket with powerful
motors firing could still gently pull itself free.

Taking relativistic considerations into account, however, we find
that black holes are far more exotic entities. Given the usual
understanding that relativity theory rules out any physical process
going faster than light, we conclude that not only is light unable to
escape from such a body: nothing would be able to escape this
gravitational force. That includes the powerful rocket that could
escape a Newtonian black hole. Further, once the body has collapsed
down to the point where its escape velocity is the speed of light, no
physical force whatsoever could prevent the body from continuing to
collapse down further – for this would be equivalent to
accelerating something to speeds beyond that of light. Thus once this
critical amount of collapse is reached, the body will get smaller and
smaller, more and more dense, without limit. It has formed a
relativistic black hole; at its center lies a spacetime
singularity.

For any given body, this critical stage of unavoidable collapse
occurs when the object has collapsed to within its so-called
Schwarzschild radius, which is proportional to the mass of the body.
Our sun has a Schwarzschild radius of approximately three kilometers;
the Earth's Schwarzschild radius is a little less than a centimeter.
This means that if you could collapse all the Earth's matter down to a
sphere the size of a pea, it would form a black hole. It is worth
noting, however, that one does not need an extremely high density of
matter to form a black hole if one has enough mass. Thus for example,
if one has a couple hundred million solar masses of water at its
standard density, it will be contained within its Schwarzschild radius
and will form a black hole. Some supermassive black holes at the
centers of galaxies are thought to be even more massive than this, at
several billion solar masses.

The “event horizon” of a black hole is the point of no return. That
is, it comprises the last events in the spacetime around the
singularity at which a light signal can still escape to the external
universe. For a standard (uncharged, non-rotating) black hole, the
event horizon lies at the Schwarzschild radius. A flash of light that
originates at an event inside the black hole will not be able to
escape, but will instead end up in the central singularity of the black
hole. A light flash originating at an event outside of the event
horizon will escape, but it will be red-shifted strongly to the extent
that it is near the horizon. An outgoing beam of light that originates
at an event on the event horizon itself, by definition, remains on the
event horizon until the temporal end of the universe.

General relativity tells us that clocks running at different
locations in a gravitational field will generally not agree with one
another. In the case of a black hole, this manifests itself in the
following way. Imagine someone falls into a black hole, and, while
falling, she flashes a light signal to us every time her watch hand
ticks. Observing from a safe distance outside the black hole, we would
find the times between the arrival of successive light signals to grow
larger without limit. That is, it would appear to us that time were
slowing down for the falling person as she approached the event
horizon. The ticking of her watch (and every other process as well)
would seem to go slower and slower as she got closer and closer to the
event horizon. We would never actually see the light signals she emits
when she crosses the event horizon; instead, she would seem to be
eternally “frozen” just above the horizon. (This talk of “seeing” the
person is somewhat misleading, because the light coming from the person
would rapidly become severely red-shifted, and soon would not be
practically detectable.)

From the perspective of the infalling person, however, nothing
unusual happens at the event horizon. She would experience no slowing
of clocks, nor see any evidence that she is passing through the event
horizon of a black hole. Her passing the event horizon is simply the
last moment in her history at which a light signal she emits would be
able to escape from the black hole. The concept of an event horizon is
a global concept that depends on how the events on the event
horizon relate to the overall structure of the spacetime.
Locally there is nothing noteworthy about the events at the
event horizon. If the black hole is fairly small, then the tidal
gravitational forces there would be quite strong. This just means that
gravitational pull on one's feet, closer to the singularity, would be
much stronger than the gravitational pull on one's head. That
difference of force would be great enough to pull one apart. For a
sufficiently large black hole the difference in gravitation at one's
feet and head would be small enough for these tidal forces to be
negligible.

As in the case of singularties, alternative definitions of black
holes have been explored. These definitions typically focus on the
one-way nature of the event horizon: things can go in, but nothing can
get out. Such accounts have not won widespread support, however, and we
have not space here to elaborate on them
further.[4]

One of the most remarkable features of relativistic black holes is
that they are purely gravitational entities. A pure black hole
spacetime contains no matter whatsoever. It is a “vacuum” solution to
the Einstein field equations, which just means that it is a solution of
Einstein's gravitational field equations in which the matter density is
everywhere zero. (Of course, one can also consider a black hole with
matter present.) In pre-relativistic physics we think of gravity as a
force produced by the mass contained in some matter. In the context of
general relativity, however, we do away with gravitational force, and
instead postulate a curved spacetime geometry that produces all the
effects we standardly attribute to gravity. Thus a black hole is not a
“thing” in spacetime; it is instead a feature of spacetime
itself.

A careful definition of a relativistic black hole will therefore
rely only on the geometrical features of spacetime. We'll need to be a
little more precise about what it means to be “a region from which
nothing, not even light, can escape.” First, there will have to be
someplace to escape to if our definition is to make sense. The
most common method of making this idea precise and rigorous employs the
notion of “escaping to infinity.” If a particle or light ray cannot
“travel arbitrarily far” from a definite, bounded region in the
interior of spacetime but must remain always in the region, the idea
is, then that region is one of no escape, and is thus a black hole. The
boundary of the region is called the event
horizon. Once a physical entity crosses the event horizon into
the hole, it never crosses it again.

Second, we will need a clear notion of the geometry that allows for
“escape,” or makes such escape impossible. For this, we need the notion
of the “causal structure” of spacetime. At any event in the spacetime,
the possible trajectories of all light signals form a cone (or, more
precisely, the four-dimensional analog of a cone). Since light travels
at the fastest speed allowed in the spacetime, these cones map out the
possible causal processes in the spacetime. If an occurence at an event
A is able to causally affect another occurence at event B, there must
be a continuous trajectory in spacetime from event A to event B such
that the trajectory lies in or on the lightcones of every event along
it. (For more discussion, see the Supplementary Document:
Lightcones and Causal Structure.)

Figure 1 is a spacetime diagram of a sphere of matter collapsing
down to form a black hole. The curvature of the spacetime is
represented by the tilting of the light cones away from 45 degrees.
Notice that the light cones tilt inwards more and more as one
approaches the center of the black hole. The jagged line running
vertically up the center of the diagram depicts the black hole central
singularity. As we emphasized in Section 1, this is not actually
part of the spacetime, but might be thought of as an
edge of space and time itself. Thus, one should not imagine
the possibility of traveling through the singularity; this
would be as nonsensical as something's leaving the diagram (i.e., the
spacetime) altogether.

Figure 1: A spacetime diagram of black hole
formation

What makes this a black hole spacetime is the fact that it contains
a region from which it is impossible to exit while traveling at or
below the speed of light. This region is marked off by the events at
which the outside edge of the forward light cone points straight
upward. As one moves inward from these events, the light cone tilts so
much that one is always forced to move inward toward the central
singularity. This point of no return is, of course, the event horizon;
and the spacetime region inside it is the black hole. In this region,
one inevitably moves towards the singularity; the impossibility of
avoiding the singularity is exactly like the impossibility of
preventing ourselves from moving forward in time.

Notice that the matter of the collapsing star disappears into the
black hole singularity. All the details of the matter are completely
lost; all that is left is the geometrical properties of the black hole
which can be identified with mass, charge, and angular momentum.
Indeed, there are so-called “no-hair” theorems which make rigorous the
claim that a black hole in equilibrium is entirely characterized by its
mass, its angular momentum, and its electric charge. This has the
remarkable consequence that no matter what the particulars may be of
any body that collapses to form a black hole—it may be as
intricate, complicated and Byzantine as one likes, composed of the most
exotic materials—the final result after the system has settled
down to equilibrium will be identical in every respect to a black hole
that formed from the collapse of any other body having the
same total mass, angular momentum and electric charge. For this reason
Chandrasekhar (1983) called black holes “the most perfect objects in
the universe.”

While spacetime singularities in general are frequently viewed with
suspicion, physicists often offer the reassurance that we expect most
of them to be hidden away behind the event horizons of black holes.
Such singularities therefore could not affect us unless we were
actually tojump into the black hole. A “naked” singularity, on the
other hand, is one that is not hidden behind an event horizon. Such
singularities appear much more threatening because they are
uncontained, accessible to vast areas of spacetime.

The heart of the worry is that singular structure would seem to
signify some sort of breakdown in the fundamental structure of
spacetime to such a profound depth that it could wreak havoc on any
region of universe that it were visible to. Because the structures that
break down in singular spacetimes are required for the formulation of
our known physical laws in general, and of initial-value problems for
individual physical systems in particular, one such fear is that
determinism would collapse entirely wherever the singular breakdown
were causally visible. As Earman (1995, pp. 65-6) characterizes the
worry, nothing would seem to stop the singularity from “disgorging” any
manner of unpleasant jetsam, from TVs showing Nixon's Checkers Speech
to old lost socks, in a way completely undetermined by the state of
spacetime in any region whatsoever, and in such a way as to render
strictly indeterminable all regions in causal contact with what it
spews out.

One form that such a naked singularity could take is that of a
white hole, which is a time-reversed black hole. Imagine
taking a film of a black hole forming, and various astronauts, rockets,
etc. falling into it. Now imagine that film being run backwards. This
is the picture of a white hole: one starts with a naked singularity,
out of which might appear people, artifacts, and eventually a star
bursting forth. Absolutely nothing in the causal past of such a white
hole would determine what would pop out of it (just as items that fall
into a black hole leave no trace on the future). Because the field
equations of general relativity do not pick out a preferred direction
of time, if the formation of a black hole is allowed by the laws of
spacetime and gravity, then white holes will also be permitted by these
laws.

Roger Penrose famously suggested that although naked singularties
are comaptible with general relativity, in physically realistic
situations naked singularities will never form; that is, any process
that results in a singularity will safely deposit that singularity
behind an event horizon. This suggestion, titled the “Cosmic Censorship
Hypothesis,” has met with a fair degree of success and popularity;
however, it also faces several difficulties.

Penrose's original formulation relied on black holes: a suitably
generic singularity will always be contained in a black hole (and so
causally invisible outside the black hole). As the counter-examples to
various ways of articulating the hypothesis in terms of this idea have
accumulated over the years, it has gradually been abandoned.

More recent approaches either begin with an attempt to provide
necessary and sufficient conditions for cosmic censorship itself,
yielding an indirect characterization of a naked singularity as any
phenomenon violating those conditions, or else they begin with an
attempt to provide a characterization of a naked singularity and so
conclude with a definite statement of cosmic censorship as the absence
of such phenomena. The variety of proposals made using both approaches
is too great to canvass here; the interested reader is referred to
Joshi (2003) for a review of the current state of the art, and to
Earman (1995, ch. 3) for a philosophical discussion of many of the
proposals.

The challenge of uniting quantum theory and general relativity in a
successful theory of quantum gravity has arguably been the greatest
challenge facing theoretical physics for the past eighty years. One
avenue that has seemed particularly promising here is the attempt to
apply quantum theory to black holes. This is in part because, as
completely gravitational entities, black holes present an especially
pure case to study the quantization of gravity. Further, because the
gravitational force grows without bound as one nears a standard black
hole singularity, one would expect quantum gravitational effects (which
should come into play at extremely high energies) to manifest
themselves in black holes.

Studies of quantum mechanics in black hole spacetimes have revealed
several surprises that threaten to overturn our traditional views of
space, time, and matter. A remarkable parallel between the laws of
black hole mechanics and the laws of thermodynamics indicates that
spacetime and thermodynamics may be linked in a fundamental (and
previously unimagined) way. This linkage hints at a fundamental
limitation on how much entropy can be contained in a spatial region. A
further topic of foundational importance is found in the so-called
information loss paradox, which suggests that standard quantum
evolution will not hold when black holes are present. While many of
these suggestions are somewhat speculative, they nevertheless touch on
deep issues in the foundations of physics.

In the early 1970s, Bekenstein argued that the second law of
thermodynamics requires one to assign a finite entropy to a black hole.
His worry was that one could collapse any amount of highly entropic
matter into a black hole — which, as we have emphasized, is an
extremely simple object — leaving no trace of the original
disorder. This seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which
asserts that the entropy (disorder) of a closed system can never
decrease. However, adding mass to a black hole will increase its size,
which led Bekenstein to suggest that the area of a black hole is a
measure of its entropy. This conviction grew when, in 1972, Hawking
proved that the surface area of a black hole, like the entropy of a
closed system, can never decrease.

The similarity between black holes and thermodynamic systems was
considerably strengthened when Bardeen, Carter, and Hawking (1973)
proved three other laws of black hole mechanics that parallel exactly
the first, third, and “zeroth” laws of thermodynamics. Although this
parallel was extremely suggestive, taking it seriously would require
one to assign a non-zero temperature to a black hole, which all then
agreed was absurd: All hot bodies emit thermal radiation (like the heat
given off from a stove). However, according to general relativity, a
black hole ought to be a perfect sink for energy, mass, and radiation,
insofar as it absorbs everything (including light), and emits nothing
(including light). The only temperature one might be able to assign it
would be absolute zero.

This obvious fact was overthrown when Hawking (1974, 1975)
demonstrated that black holes are not completely “black” after all. His
analysis of quantum fields in black hole spacetimes revealed that the
black holes will emit particles: black holes generate heat at a
temperature that is inversely proportional to their mass and directly
proportional to their so-called surface gravity. It glows like a lump
of smoldering coal even though light should not be able to escape from
it! The temperature of this “Hawking effect” radiation is extremely low
for stellar-scale black holes, but for very small black holes the
temperatures would be quite high. This means that a very small black
hole should rapidly evaporate away, as all of its mass-energy is
emitted in high-temperature Hawking radiation.

These results were taken to establish that the parallel between the
laws of black hole mechanics and the laws of thermodynamics was not a
mere fluke: it seems they really are getting at the same deep physics.
The Hawking effect establishes that the surface gravity of a black hole
can indeed be interpreted as a physical temperature. Further, mass in
black hole mechanics is mirrored by energy in thermodynamics, and we
know from relativity theory that mass and energy are actually
equivalent. Connecting the two sets of laws also requires linking the
surface area of a black hole with entropy, as Bekenstein had suggested.
This black hole entropy is called its Bekenstein entropy, and is
proportional to the area of the event horizon of the black hole.

In the context of thermodynamic systems containing black holes, one
can construct apparent violations of the laws of thermodynamics, and of
the laws of black hole mechanics, if one considers these laws to be
independent of each other. So for example, if a black hole gives off
radiation through the Hawking effect, then it will lose mass – in
apparent violation of the area increase theorem. Likewise, as
Bekenstein argued, we could violate the second law of thermodynamics by
dumping matter with high entropy into a black hole. However, the price
of dropping matter into the black hole is that its event horizon will
increase in size. Likewise, the price of allowing the event horizon to
shrink by giving off Hawking radiation is that the entropy of the
external matter fields will go up. We can consider a
combination of the two laws that stipulates that the
sum of a black hole's area, and the entropy of the
system, can never decrease. This is the generalized second law of
(black hole) thermodynamics.

From the time that Bekenstein first proposed that the area of a
black hole could be a measure of its entropy, it was know to face
difficulties that appeared insurmountable. Geroch (1971) proposed a
scenario that seems to allow a violation of the generalized second law.
If we have a box full of energetic radiation with a high entropy, that
box will have a certain weight as it is attracted by the gravitational
force of a black hole. One can use this weight to drive an engine to
produce energy (e.g., to produce electricity) while slowly lowering the
box towards the event horizon of the black hole. This process extracts
energy, but not entropy, from the radiation in the box; once the box
reaches the event horizon itself, it can have an arbitrarily small
amount of energy remaining. If one then opens the box to let the
radiation fall into the black hole, the size of the event horizon will
not increase any appreciable amount (because the mass-energy of the
black hole has barely been increased), but the thermodynamic entropy
outside the black hole has decreased. Thus we seem to have violated the
generalized second law.

The question of whether we should be troubled by this possible
violation of the generalized law touches on several issues in the
foundations of physics. The status of the ordinary second law of
thermodynamics is itself a thorny philosophical puzzle, quite apart
from the issue of black holes. Many physicists and philosophers deny
that the ordinary second law holds universally, so one might question
whether we should insist on its validity in the presence of black
holes. On the other hand, the second law clearly captures some
significant feature of our world, and the analogy between black hole
mechanics and thermodynamics seems too rich to be thrown out without a
fight. Indeed, the generalized second law is our only law that joins
together the fields of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and
thermodynamics. As such, it seems the most promising window we have
into the truly fundamental nature of the physical world.

5.2.1 Entropy Bounds and the Holographic Principle

In response to this apparent violation of the generalized second
law, Bekenstein pointed out that one could never get all of the
radiation in the box arbitrarily close to the event horizon, because
the box itself would have to have some volume. This observation by
itself is not enough to save the second law, however, unless there is
some limit to how much entropy can be contained in a given volume of
space. Current physics poses no such limit, so Bekenstein (1981)
postulated that the limit would be enforced by the underlying theory of
quantum gravity, which black hole thermodynamics is providing a glimpse
of.

However, Unruh and Wald (1982) argue that there is a less ad hoc way
to save the generalized second law. The heat given off by any hot body,
including a black hole, will produce a kind of “buoyancy” force on any
object (like our box) that blocks thermal radiation. This means that
when we are lowering our box of high-entropy radiation towards the
black hole, the optimal place to release that radiation will
not be just above the event horizon, but rather at the
“floating point” for the container. Unruh and Wald demonstrate that
this fact is enough guarantee that the decrease in outside entropy will
be compensated by an increase in the area of the event horizon. It
therefore seems that there is no reliable way to violate the
generalized second law of black hole thermodynamics.

There is, however, a further reason that one might think that black
hole thermodynamics implies a fundamental bound on the amount of
entropy that can be contained in a region. Suppose that there were
more entropy in some region of space than the Bekenstein
entropy of a black hole of the same size. Then one could collapse that
entropic matter into a black hole, which obviously could not be larger
than the size of the original region (or the mass-energy would have
already formed a black hole). But this would violate the generalized
second law, for the Bekenstein entropy of a the resulting black hole
would be less than that of the matter that formed it. Thus the second
law appears to imply a fundamental limit on how much entropy a region
can contain. If this is right, it seems to be a deep insight into the
nature of quantum gravity.

Arguments along these lines led ‘t Hooft (1985) to postulate the
“Holographic Principle” (though the title is due to Susskind). This
principle claims that the number of fundamental degrees of freedom in
any spherical region is given by the Bekenstein entropy of a black hole
of the same size as that region. The Holographic Principle is notable
not only because it postulates a well-defined, finite, number of
degrees of freedom for any region, but also because this number grows
as the area surrounding the region, and not as the volume of the
region. This flies in the face of standard physical pictures, whether
of particles or fields. According to that picture, the entropy is the
number of possible ways something can be, and that number of ways
increases as the volume of any spatial region. The Holographic
Principle does get some support from a result in string theory known as
the “AdS/CFT correspondence.” If the Principle is correct, then one
spatial dimension can, in a sense, be viewed as superfluous: the
fundamental physical story of a spatial region is actually a story that
can be told merely about the boundary of the region.

5.2.2 What Does Black Hole Entropy Measure?

In classical thermodynamics, that a system possesses entropy is
often attributed to the fact that we in practice are never able to
render to it a “complete” description. When describing a
cloud of gas, we do not specify values for the position and velocity of
every molecule in it; we rather describe it in terms of quantities,
such as pressure and temperature, constructed as statistical measures
over underlying, more finely grained quantities, such as the momentum
and energy of the individual molecules. The entropy of the gas then
measures the incompleteness, as it were, of the gross description. In
the attempt to take seriously the idea that a black hole has a true
physical entropy, it is therefore natural to attempt to construct such
a statistical origin for it. The tools of classical general relativity
cannot provide such a construction, for it allows no way to describe a
black hole as a system whose physical attributes arise as gross
statistical measures over underlying, more finely grained quantities.
Not even the tools of quantum field theory on curved spacetime can
provide it, for they still treat the black hole as an entity defined
entirely in terms of the classical geometry of the spacetime. Any such
statistical accounting, therefore, must come from a theory that
attributes to the classical geometry a description in terms of an
underlying, discrete collection of micro-states. Explaining what these
states are that are counted by the Bekenstein entropy has been a
challenge that has been eagerly pursued by quantum gravity
researchers.

In 1996, superstring theorists were able to give an account of how
M-theory (which is an extension of superstring theory)
generates a number of the string-states for a certain class of black
holes, and this number matched that given by the Bekenstein entropy
(Strominger and Vafa, 1996). A counting of black hole states using loop
quantum gravity has also recovered the Bekenstein entropy (Ashtekar et
al., 1998). It is philosophically noteworthy that this is treated as a
significant success for these theories (i.e., it is presented as a
reason for thinking that these theories are on the right track) even
though Hawking radiation has never been experimentally observed (in
part, because for macroscopic black holes the effect is minute).

Hawking's discovery that black holes give off radiation presented an
apparent problem for the possibility of describing black holes quantum
mechanically. According to standard quantum mechanics, the entropy of a
closed system never changes; this is captured formally by the “unitary”
nature of quantum evolution. Such evolution guarantees that the initial
conditions, together with the quantum Schrödinger equation, will
fix the future state of the system. Likewise, a reverse application of
the Schrödinger equation will take us from the later state back to
the original initial state. The states at each time are rich enough,
detailed enough, to fix (via the dynamical equations) the states at all
other times. Thus there is a sense in which the completeness
of the state is maintained by unitary time evolution.

It is typical to characterize this feature with the claim that
quantum evolution “preserves information.” If one begins with a system
in a precisely known quantum state, then unitary evolution guarantees
that the details about that system will evolve in such a way that one
can infer the precise quantum state of the system at some later time
(as long as one knows the law of evolution and can perform the relevant
calculations), and vice versa. This quantum preservation of details
implies that if we burn a chair, for example, it would in principle be
possible to perform a complete set of measurements on all the outgoing
radiation, the smoke, and the ashes, and reconstruct exactly what the
chair looked like. However, if we were instead to throw the chair into
a black hole, then it would be physically impossible for the details
about the chair ever to escape to the outside universe. This might not
be a problem if the black hole continued to exist for all time, but
Hawking tells us that the black hole is giving off energy, and thus it
will shrink down and presumably will eventually disappear altogether.
At that point, the details about the chair will be irrevocably lost;
thus such evolution cannot be described unitarily. This problem has
been labeled the “information loss paradox” of quantum black holes.

(A brief technical explanation for those familiar with quantum
mechanics: The argument is simply that the interior and the exterior of
the black hole will generally be entangled. However, microcausality
implies that the entangled degrees of freedom in the black hole cannot
coherently recombine with the external universe. Thus once the black
hole has completely evaporated away, the entropy of the universe will
have increased — in violation of unitary evolution.)

The attitude physicists adopted towards this paradox was apparently
strongly influenced by their vision of which theory, general relativity
or quantum theory, would have to yield to achieve a consistent theory
of quantum gravity. Spacetime physicists tended to view non-unitary
evolution as a fairly natural consequence of singular spacetimes: one
wouldn't expect all the details to be available at late times if they
were lost in a singularity. Hawking, for example, argued that the
paradox shows that the full theory of quantum gravity will be a
non-unitary theory, and he began working to develop such a theory. (He
has since abandoned this position.)

However, particle physicists (such as superstring theorists) tended
to view black holes as being just another quantum state. If two
particles were to collide at extremely high (i.e., Planck-scale)
energies, they would form a very small black hole. This tiny black hole
would have a very high Hawking temperature, and thus it would very
quickly give off many high-energy particles and disappear. Such a
process would look very much like a standard high-energy scattering
experiment: two particles collide and their mass-energy is then
converted into showers of outgoing particles. The fact that all known
scattering processes are unitary then seems to give us some reason to
expect that black hole formation and evaporation should also be
unitary.

These considerations led many physicists to propose scenarios that
might allow for the unitary evolution of quantum black holes, while
not violating other basic physical principles, such as the requirement
that no physical influences be allowed to travel faster than light (the
requirement of “microcausality”), at least not when we are far from the
domain of quantum gravity (the “Planck scale”). Once energies do enter
the domain of quantum gravity, e.g. near the central singularity of a
black hole, then we might expect the classical description of spacetime
to break down; thus, physicists were generally prepared to allow for
the possibility of violations of microcausality in this region.

A very helpful overview of this debate can be found in Belot,
Earman, and Ruetsche (1999). Most of the scenarios proposed to escape
Hawking's argument faced serious difficulties and have been abandoned
by their supporters. The proposal that currently enjoys the most
wide-spread (though certainly not universal) support is known as “black
hole complementarity.” This proposal has been the subject of
philosophical controversy because it includes apparently incompatible
claims, and then tries to escape the contradiction by making a
controversial appeal to quantum complementarity or (so charge the
critics) verificationism.

5.3.1 Black Hole Complementarity

The challenge of saving information from a black hole lies in the
fact that it is impossible to copy the quantum details (especially the
quantum correlations) that are preserved by unitary evolution. This
implies that if the details pass behind the event horizon, for example,
if an astronaut falls into a black hole, then those details are lost
forever. Advocates of black hole complementarity (Susskind et al.
1993), however, point out that an outside observer will never see the
infalling astronaut pass through the event horizon. Instead, as we saw
in Section 2, she will seem to hover at the horizon for all time. But
all the while, the black hole will also be giving off heat, and
shrinking down, and getting hotter, and shrinking more. The black hole
complementarian therefore suggests that an outside observer should
conclude that the infalling astronaut gets burned up before she crosses
the event horizon, and all the details about her state will be returned
in the outgoing radiation, just as would be the case if she and her
belongings were incinerated in a more conventional manner; thus the
information (and standard quantum evolution) is saved.

However, this suggestion flies in the face of the fact (discussed
earlier) that for an infalling observer, nothing out of the ordinary
should be experienced at the event horizon. Indeed, for a large enough
black hole, one wouldn't even know that she was passing through an
event horizon at all. This obviously contradicts the suggestion that
she might be burned up as she passes through the horizon. The black
hole complementarian tries to resolve this contradiction by
agreeing that the infalling observer will notice nothing
remarkable at the horizon. This is followed by a suggestion that the
account of the infalling astronaut should be considered to be
“complementary” to the account of the external observer, rather in the
same way that position and momentum are complementary descriptions of
quantum particles (Susskind et al. 1993). The fact that the infalling
observer cannot communicate to the external world that she survived her
passage through the event horizon is supposed to imply that there is no
genuine contradiction here.

This solution to the information loss paradox has been criticized
for making an illegitimate appeal to verificationism (Belot, Earman,
and Ruetsche 1999). However, the proposal has nevertheless won
wide-spread support in the physics community, in part because models of
M-theory seem to behave somewhat as the black hole
complementarian scenario suggests (for a philosophical discussion, see
van Dongen and de Haro 2004). Bokulich (2005) argues that the most fruitful
way of viewing black hole complementarity is as a novel suggestion for
how a non-local theory of quantum gravity will recover the local
behavior of quantum field theory when black holes are involved.

The physical investigation of spacetime singularities and black
holes has touched on numerous philosophical issues. To begin, we were
confronted with the question of the definition and significance of
singularities. Should they be defined in terms of incomplete paths,
missing points, or curvature pathology? Should we even think that there
is a single correct answer to this question? Need we include
such things in our ontology, or do they instead merely indicate the
break-down of a particular physical theory? Are they “edges” of
spacetime, or merely inadequate descriptions that will be dispensed
with by a truly fundamental theory of quantum gravity?

This has obvious connections to the issue of how we are to interpret
the ontology of merely effective physical descriptions. The debate over
the information loss paradox also highlights the conceptual importance
of the relationship between different effective theories. At root, the
debate is over where and how our effective physical theories will break
down: when can they be trusted, and where must they be replaced by a
more adequate theory?

Black holes appear to be crucial for our understanding of the
relationship between matter and spacetime. As discussed in Section 3,
When matter forms a black hole, it is transformed into a purely
gravitational entity. When a black hole evaporates, spacetime curvature
is transformed into ordinary matter. Thus black holes offer an
important arena for investigating the ontology of spacetime and
ordinary objects.

Black holes were also seen to provide an important testing ground to
investigate the conceptual problems underlying quantum theory and
general relativity. The question of whether black hole evolution is
unitary raises the issue of how the unitary evolution of standard
quantum mechanics serves to guarantee that no experiment can reveal a
violation of energy conservation or of microcausality. Likewise, the
debate over the information loss paradox can be seen as a debate over
whether spacetime or an abstract dynamical state space (Hilbert space)
should be viewed as being more fundamental. Might spacetime itself be
an emergent entity belonging only to an effective physical theory?

Singularities and black holes are arguably our best windows into the
details of quantum gravity, which would seem to be the best candidate
for a truly fundamental physical description of the world (if such a
fundamental description exists). As such, they offer glimpses into
deepest nature of matter, dynamical laws, and space and time; and these
glimpses seem to call for a conceptual revision at least as great as
that required by quantum mechanics or relativity theory alone.

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Coleman, R. and H. Korté, 1992, “The Relation between
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Magnitude, etc. of the Fixed Stars, in consequence of the Diminution of
the velocity of their Light, in case such a Diminution should be found
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